The any-day, any-hour ramblings, rantings and remembrances of GeekGems.com's handsomest contributor, Second-Most-Interesting Man In The World . . . and definitely its most eclectic, anachronistic, esoteric insomniac.

Monday, April 18, 2011

Though I’ve played a few stand-out titles, first-person shooters don’t rank highly among my most preferred games. That prejudice alone handicaps most FPS titles (admittedly, not always fairly) and amplifies every grating minor irritation like dragging a rusty nail across a chalkboard next to a microphone plugged into a Marshall stack. That acknowledged prejudice toward what I often regard as a repetitive genre that’s ever reinventing the wheel actually amplifies my respect for what a complete, enjoyable game this really is.

Crysis 2 is developed by Crytek for Electronic Arts and powered by the debuting CryEngine 3. Over-the-top bastardization of a single prefix? Perhaps. But when your game looks and plays this smoothly with nary a hitch, you’ve more than backed up the bravado. An engine producing graphics, textures and shadows this crisp, detailed and flawless comes along rarely. Only one other engine truly belongs anywhere near this one in terms of visual presentation, and it’s another engine forever bearing the name of its legendary debut appearance: Unreal.

What sets EA's latest superb shooter head-and-shoulders above nearly every other I've played? Find out right here, right now.

Meet Sleepless Colin

If you poured the essence of High Fidelity’s Rob Gordon and Psych’s Shawn Spencer into a blender, sprinkled in just the right hint of Dexter Morgan, added a splash of Scotch and hit “frappe” . . . you’d have the closest thing anyone could make to The Sleepless One.